Honest With God: Finding Healing and Wholeness Through the PsalmsNäide

I traveled across the world right before graduating from college.

We met a new friend on our trip, who invited us to visit his family, who lived far outside the city. After the bumpiest Jeep ride I’ve ever experienced, we had a meal in a hostel and then walked outside to head to where we would sleep.

The moment I stepped out of that primitive yurt in the mountains of Central Asia, I looked up and the night sky took my breath away! Growing up in Las Vegas, I didn’t see many stars due to the light pollution. I'd never seen anything like that sky – thousands upon thousands of stars blazing like scattered diamonds on black cloth. The Milky Way stretched across the heavens in a way that I’d only ever seen in textbooks or museums.

I stood there, twenty-one years old and far from home, trying to absorb the magnificent display above me. My chest tightened with an emotion I couldn't name – something between wonder and worship, awe and overwhelming smallness.

King David must have felt something similar when he penned the words that would become Psalm 8. Perhaps he, too, had escaped the glow of Jerusalem's oil lamps and found himself alone beneath the bright sky of the Judean wilderness.

“Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory in the heavens.” (Psalm 8:1 NIV) David’s words practically vibrated with wonder.

But wonder, I've discovered, requires something precious and increasingly rare in our world: undivided attention. Nine years ago, our family moved to a smaller town. For months, I'd been dragging garbage cans to the curb under the same brilliant canopy of stars I'd marveled at in Asia. The stars had been there every single night. I simply hadn't bothered to look up. One night, I looked up and stood there until a family member came to check on me.

Like spiritual light pollution, the endless stream of notifications, news alerts, and digital distractions had dimmed my ability to see God's glory burning brightly all around me. I'd grown numb to the miraculous, immune to wonder.

David's response to the night sky reveals the heart of someone still capable of being undone by beauty: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” (Psalm 8:3-4 NIV)

Here's what David understood and what I'm slowly learning: wonder about what God has done in the past keeps us engaged with God in the present. When we lose our sense of amazement at His love, grace, and transformation in our lives, everything else begins to lose its luster as well.

Tonight, step outside. Look up. Let the stars remind you that the God who hung them in space is mindful of you. Tomorrow, I’ll share how I discovered God’s love in the middle of one of my lowest moments.